He has sometimes been accused of preaching politics. A good brother who formerly lived in Missouri, said, not long before father's death: "They used to tell me before I came to Kansas that Pardee Butler preached politics, and I said that if ever I heard him begin to preach politics, I was going to get right up in meeting, and ask him to show his Scripture for preaching politics. Now I've been hearing him preach, off and on, for twenty years, and I've never got up in meeting yet, for I've never heard him preach any politics."
The only sermon that I can remember as containing any allusion to politics, was one that he preached at Pardee that summer of 1858. It was from the text, "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone." After speaking in a general manner of Christian duties that are left undone by those who are precise about certain theological points, he spoke plainly of the injustice and unmercifulness of slavery, and besought Christians to be careful how they upheld it in any manner, lest they be condemned by the words of the text.
Another sermon that he preached at Pardee, August 1, 1858, was from I. Kings xviii. 21: "If the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him." After delineating very graphically the terrible drouth, and the long contest of Elijah with Ahab and Jezebel, he told of the final triumph of religion, and the merited defeat and punishment of wickedness. He finished with an eloquent appeal from the text, "If the Lord be God, then serve him." At the close two boys confessed their Savior. One of them was an orphan boy, then making his home at my father's house, and since known as Judge J. J. Locker, of Atchison, who died last September.
But winter came, and the co-operation that had engaged father that summer felt that they had paid all they could raise. It had not been enough to pay a hired man, and meet our frugal expenses. Yet that was the first money he had made for three and a half years, except by his two trips to Illinois. He had appealed to the General Missionary Society, and they had declined to support him, unless he would promise not to say a word about slavery. But the people were calling to him from every direction to come and organize churches. He decided to appeal personally to the churches in the older States. From December, 1858, until May, 1859, he preached constantly in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio, collecting what money he could. He reported $365 as the amount received, expenses $110, leaving a balance of $255. He received enough more during the summer to make his salary #297.42.
The next summer he preached in Kansas; but was not gone all the time, as when in other States. When preaching in distant counties he was sometimes gone four or five weeks, but he was sometimes at home a part of every week. When at home he worked very hard on the farm, to accomplish what he saw must be done, that he might go back to his preaching as soon as possible. Mother looked after the work in his absence, and was a good manager, but there was much to which she could not attend. Father was nervously energetic, always working and walking rapidly. Even after he was sixty years old, although he was a slender man, only five feet nine inches in height, with his right arm trembling with palsy, I have known robust young men to complain that they did not like to work for Pardee Butler, because he would work with them, and they were ashamed to have such an old man do more than they did, and he worked so hard that he wore them out. He scarcely spent an idle moment. Other men could be content to pass their time in careless conversation, but he never could. Unless he had some subject that he thought especially worthy of conversation, he said little. He seldom spoke of what he had done, and scarcely ever related any of the many experiences of his trips away from home. In his backwoods boyhood experiences he had learned to make or mend almost every article used by a farmer. He was full of projects, always improving something on the place. Every spare moment was used, either in fixing something about the farm, or in reading or writing. He sometimes complained that the days were not half long enough to suit him. He once told his sister that the Border Ruffians never knew what a service they did him when they rafted him, for he had leisure to think while he was going down the river. My brother Charley once said that father was so greedy of time he was afraid he might lose a minute. Often in the evening we had to make room by the cooking stove for his shaving-horse, or his leather and harness tools, while he worked until ten or eleven o'clock making or mending some implement or harness. And often, after laboring all day, he read or wrote until eleven or twelve o'clock at night. He read a great variety of books and newspapers, but was particularly fond of church history and religious books of a doctrinal nature.
He wrote much for various papers, and was a painstaking writer. He usually wrote his articles two or three times, and the account of his second mob that was written for the Herald of Freedom he re-wrote seven times. He could write best in the morning, and frequently read and wrote half of the forenoon; and then worked and chored until nine or ten at night, to make up lost time.
Few ever knew the strong desire that he constantly felt for a life devoted wholly to study and preaching. Living, as we did in those days, in a log house with only one room, he had no private place for study, but read or wrote in the midst of the family. Yet neither crying babies nor the noisy play of older children distracted him. Often he sat, with a look of abstraction, in the midst of our conversation; and we frequently had to speak to him several times before we could attract his attention.
We have several hundred of his newspaper articles saved in scrap-books. He preached altogether without notes, and never seemed to make any especial preparation for preaching a sermon. I once asked him how long it took him to prepare a sermon, and he replied, "Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, generally two or three years. Of course I do not think of it all that time, but I seldom preach on a subject when it first enters my mind, but let it mature. I always have several subjects on hand at once, and when I am reading I retain whatever strikes me as pertaining to anyone of my subjects." "When do you do most of your thinking?" I asked. "Whenever I can; mostly on horseback."
His education was never finished; he was a student to the day of his death. Even during his last sickness he asked me to return a volume of Macaulay's "History of England" that I had borrowed, so that some one could read to him from it.
In July, 1859, he was sick for some time; but in September reports thus: "Since I recovered from my sickness I have held a series of meetings,—one near Atchison, which resulted in eight additions; one at Big Springs, at which four were added by baptism; and one at Pardee, where there was one baptized."